In various proposed systems, uplink traffic may require a minimum bandwidth to transfer data from a User Equipment (UE) to a network element. One way to achieve this is the use of multiple uplink carriers that may be aggregated for use by the UE in order to increase the available uplink throughput. One such system is the Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A), which corresponds to the Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) Release 10.
However, existing E-UTRA Release 8 logical channel prioritization schemes for local scheduling at the UE of logical channel traffic into Medium Access Control (MAC) Protocol Data Units (PDUs) has been designed for single carrier use. This scheme does not consider the use of multiple carriers, nor does it consider whether different uplink carriers may exhibit different characteristics nor the presence of multiple simultaneous uplink grants within the same subframe to a UE. The above also applies to other systems having a single uplink carrier which may also make use of multi-carrier aggregation.